Occulta Veritas - Irreducible Fear of the Sublime

Angry Metal Guy

From the seemingly boundless nightmare realm that is the melting pot of extreme, dissonant black and blackened death metal, Occulta Veritas arises. The creation of Daniele Vergine, guitarist of Noise Trail Immersion, it veers off on its own experimental path with that project as a starting point. Blending post, atmospheric, and the most chaotically inaccessible black metal into an unusual, confrontational whole, Irreducible Fear of the Sublime presents its own challenge. The world the album takes its listener into is one that—perhaps typically, but very appropriately—purports to delve deep into the mind, mired in particular, in the theories of Lacan.¹ It could be another befuddling, indistinguishable assault, forgotten as soon as it’s gone, or it could be a frightening dream you don’t forget.

You don’t need a psychology degree to analyze Irreducible Fear of the Sublime; nor would it help you. Here, vocals—and the meaning carried by the words they communicate—are rather a distillation of pinpointed emotion than they are a narration. Buried under the layers of tumbling chords, and choked in a muffled veil of distortion, they form yet another dissonant element to ring against the others, and the audience is encouraged to experience the music as a collective rise and fall of noise. It is better appreciated in this manner, for when the focus moves from these violent, incomprehensible screams, clambering, lurching riffs, and apparently fickle tempo fluctuations—the individual parts that relentlessly jostle for presence—to the piece they collectively create, much of what seems baffling and unnatural simply becomes a necessary part of the whole. On the macro level, the solemn, post-metal bridge “S(Ⱥ)” is a chapter of obvious beauty amidst its tortured peers with eerie, yet delicate atmosphere and haunting female singing. But on the micro, from the twisted, backwards scales (“The Mirror Stage”), impossibly clustered progressions (“Metonimia”), and lurching assaults of the blackened avantgarde (“The Sacred Horizons of Totality,” “Bound to Incompleteness”), comes a strange coherence, and suddenly, genuine harmoniousness.

Irreducible Fear Of The Sublime by OCCULTA VERITAS

What’s hardest to pin down about the album is its soul. This has nothing to do with its chaos, nor its heaviness. Rather, it is a function of its disparity. Part of me feels that such a refusal to be, or to mean, any one thing, is perfectly intentional; hence the extreme discomfort that tracks such as “The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness,” and the title track generate, with their stubborn flaunting of any boundary in key, rhythm, or force when crafting their nonetheless elegantly composed whole. Sometimes so purely intense, that it’s practically peaceful (“The Mirror Stage,” title track), and sometimes almost upsettingly jarring and borderline irritating in predictable unpredictability (“The Sacred Horizons…” “Metonimia”), just because it succeeds—and it does definitely succeed—in crafting something paradoxically coherent, doesn’t mean that what it crafts has any more substance than the dense smog you the music fills your lungs with as you experience it. Yet on the other hand, it’s difficult not to get lost in that smog, particularly when these perplexing passages of turmoil give way to melancholic lament (“The Sacred Horizons”) and plunge into liquid atmospheres (“The Mirror Stage,” “Bound to Incompleteness”).

For what could have simply been a wall of sound, Irreducible Fear of the Sublime is notably distinct. Peaking unsurprisingly over the limbo of “S(Ⱥ),” the remaining brutal companions are rendered yet more cutting and confrontational through relative clarity of every jangling, jarring element. Though the vocals are the obvious exception to this dynamic contrast, the music fares all the better for their repression. Like the conflicting sentiments and struggles manifesting in the melodic discordance, one’s straining to hear the exact facts they state is in vain, and is felt rather than consciously understood. Working in the opposite direction, nonetheless, is the listener’s inevitable desire to hear with better certainty, the voice that fills the void, and combined with the tendency to violate conventions in song structure, it can be a distractingly overwhelming listen, to the point of putting many off, I would imagine.

Where Irreducible Fear of the Sublime takes you is indeterminable. It is no soul-shattering anagnorisis, though there are moments when it almost could be, but nor is it a symptom of a crowded and indistinct subgenre of extremity. By listening, you may at least make your mind that much richer than it was before. We’ll just have to wait and see whether Occulta Veritas has further, more immediate truths to expound in future.

Rating: Good
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: I, Voidhanger
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: July 19th, 2024

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